That's an interesting point. Retouching a photo after taking it used to be "manipulating reality", frowned upon by "real" photographers. Nowadays, postprocessing digital negatives and adding your own style to it is part of a normal photographer's workflow.
(However, I think the negative feelings don't come from a discussion of "real vs fake" or "classical vs new", but mostly from the point of view that using artwork as training data is stealing. I don't agree with that view, but I think it's at the core of the argument.)
Yes, but - at least in landscape photography - there was a divide between people using retouching to "fix" things (i.e. removing spots, making the colors more realistic, etc) and the people altering the style of the photo (e.g. by boosting or even shifting certain colors to achieve a certain look). The latter was viewed as fake by some people I knew. Today this is just part of your photography style.
I'm an artist and look at generative AI as a tool that's almost always going to produce content but not art.
I refuse to use it from a moral standpoint but I also don't use any digital tools at all in the creation of my work. Even if I worked digitally I don't create art to produce pretty pictures as fast as possible. Typing in a prompt and fiddling with some things back and forth is just that.
This comment hurts me to my very core, I actually screamed when I read it. I'm in one of the most artistically productive periods of my life right now. I've been doing multiple notebook pages of gouache and india ink a day. I also have a homebuilt plotter that I've written an entire suite of software for. I've been doing 3D graphics and photomanipulation, I've been dabbling in video editing.
AND I've been pushing what can be done with Stable Diffusion, and it's absolutely a tool to create art. The idea that "Typing in a prompt and fiddling with some things back and forth" is all there is to AI art is so fucking absurd. This is the "meme" I'm talking about. There SO much more to AI art from an artistic control perspective than the prompt, and not only that, there's so much we haven't even fucking invented yet which is clear from the rate of progress in the field. These reductive "it's not real art" are even worse than the "theft" moralizing. It's akin to saying photography isn't art because you just click a button.
> I don't create art to produce pretty pictures as fast as possible.
I create art because I like to make art, sometimes that means laboring over the placement of every line. Sometimes I need three hundred frames and there's only me and my GPU against the world. AI opens up possibilities that were completely unreachable before, just like everything else I'm able to do artistically with my computer.
I'm happy you get something out of it and wish you the best. I do think it's built on theft and I do think it's a cold, lifeless medium. I think art is truth and the farther you get away from a human making something the farther you are away from the artist and feeling. A digital print will never feel as nice to me as a painting or a drawing. A handmade sculpture will always feel better to me than something produced with a mold or a 3D printer.
We're all different and again, it's great if you like making art with AI. The world needs differences, otherwise it would be quite boring.
typing some text and pressing 'generate', iterating, or doing layering and photobashing, just isn't gonna be 'painting', or 'drawing', like, ever. on a fundamental level. you'll need to get over yourself asap if you're "screaming" over this
Man I know it's pointless for me to argue but it's just like... it's wild to me that people make these comments. Do my comments give the impression that I am unaware of what drawing and painting are? I have spent thousands of hours painting and drawing.
Photography isn't gonna be painting or drawing either, it's still art that affords the artist an enormous amount of control. This is the "meme" I'm talking about. The way you talk about AI art is what's making me go AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
> typing some text and pressing 'generate', iterating, or doing layering and photobashing
It's such a self report, you have no idea what is going on, you are quick to discount it without any understanding. We are still in the infancy of the space and people are fixated with these idiotic reductive arguments. Prompt -> image is the tiniest fraction of what's possible with this technology. I wish I was better at communicating how fucking epic the set of possibilities that this opens up is, I'm sure we will see it eventually. It frustrates me to no end that people are so blind to it.
it's not the "unaware" part, it's the 'endless possibilities' (snake oil) part. ai ppl looooove to draw clouds and expect everyone to buy into that shit, yet it's not that hot. it'll always be just an app, unfortunately. it's reductive but that's just its limitation and confines.
This sort factually incorrect dogmatic screed from a position of complete ignorance, this is why I find the discourse so frustrating and why I dismissively call it a meme. Look into ControlNets, look into Deforum, look into programmatic loopback, LoRa training, model alchemy; and that's just some of what's available TODAY in a field that's moving faster than most anything else.
You're someone looking at Amiga DPaint in 1986 and claiming to understand the limitations and confines of digital art. It's absurd.
> It's such a self report, you have no idea what is going on, you are quick to discount it without any understanding. We are still in the infancy of the space and people are fixated with these idiotic reductive arguments.
> I'm sure we will see it eventually
If your basis for your art is about the hot new tool, or a tool in the future then it's just novelty. Generative AI is incredible from a technological perspective, as was Photoshop before it, but neither of them are ushering in some profound new wave of art.
> fucking epic the set of possibilities that this opens up is
Most great art and great design is built on constraints. My suggestion in using these magical tools is to reduce your possibilities to find something that speaks true to yourself.
Most professional artists will be unemployed and hobbyist artists using AI seems to be kind of against the point of creating art for the art of creation.
But for one-click self-expression, AI tools will certainly come in handy.
It kind of depends on the type of artist. I use it to illustrate my stories, for example, and I'd be upset if someone claimed my writing doesn't count as art-
But I've spent well over a decade learning to write. I don't have any skill in drawing, and I don't earn any money from my writing. (...and last time I tried to hire an artist, they bit my head off when I offered an example of what I was after.)
The dawn of the post-work age! C :
.. nearly everyone will become unemployed five years from now (when AGI / humanoid robots hit mainstream adoption). The economical paradigm will have to change inevitably. Now it's on us to nudge it towards a nice and chill open source economy with open access infrastructure and cybersyn-like global federated resource stream coordination instead of the competitive vortex of death, madness & despair we have now.
Mainstream media said the same thing about nuclear energy, steam engines, integrated circuits, and a dozen other technologies since the dawn of civilization.
It never manifested though, and people still work and produce like they did for thousands of years.
Humans are surprisingly adept at coming up with new kinds of work.
IMO the bigger "risk" is that we will extinct ourselves in the next few hundred years, but that is a different discussion.
This is absolutely ridiculous and short-sighted. AI is a tool that is and always will make the creation of art less a matter of the expression of the human soul. What techies NEVER understand about art is this: that art is not just the end product for the artist but something they use to express THEMSELVES.
UNLIKE other tools, AI makes creative decisions. No other tool has done this, and moreover, its primary purpose is to take away the reliance on artists. The ultimate aim of BIG TECH is to take away this reliance so that they can be the ultimate source of cheap art, just like cheap slave labour is the ultimate source of cheap and unsustainable clothing for most people.
Therefore, AI will NEVER be a tool to create art like other tools. It is is a tool that will outcompete humans on a massive scale so that even if "normal human art" exists, it will never gain much traction or commercial viability.
To be honest, AI is absolutely sickening and companies like Microsoft and OpenAI make me sick.
That sounds like a very Luddite view. Why wouldn't artists be able to use AI selectively to automate "boring" tasks (such as filling the sky of an image with clouds) while still retaining overall artistic control?
Because that is not what's happening. My friends that work as illustrators for PC and mobile games say it's the exact opposite. AI is used for the bulk of the creative work - composition, posing, even the general artstyle. Illustrators are then tasked with "fixing" visual artefacts, stitching together generated images and giving the final polish. They describe it as being reduced from a creative writer to a grammar checker.
It's tempting to just say that creative work that can be automated this quickly should be automated so that artists can focus on more creative challenges, but this is not how it plays out in practice. Rather, this only allows companies to cut down costs. It is already extremely difficult to find work which will pay a livable wage as a creative. AI has already caused layoffs and negative wage pressure on remaining employees. The only thing that AI has done (at least among my circle of friends) is reduce corporate costs and increase antidepressant prescriptions.
When I watch a video like the demo-video for the Krita plugin we're discussing (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QDPEcVmdLI), I do see a lot of creativity happening. The person is using stable diffusion as a tool to achieve the look, style and composition they want. The skill to be able to use such a model for creating art is definitely an acquired skill, and I would definitely consider it a form of art.
Of course there will be people just clicking "generate" on a website. But isn't that the difference between consumer and artist? Everyone can press the shutter button on a digital camera to take a snapshot. But the artist knows how to use light, angle and technology to create a photograph with the looks and composition that they intend. (If you compare snapshots from amateur photographers and from professionals, the differences are astounding. And it's not just about the cost of the equipment.)
Certainly, there will be jobs – especially the rather repetitive jobs – that will be replaced by the use of AI, just like stock photos replaced jobs of certain photographers, or just like industrialization and automation replaced the jobs of a lot of craftsmen and artisans. But craftsmen and artisans are still around, and they are paid a lot more than they used to be paid, as long as they provide added value on top of the generic products available on the market!
I would never argue that you CAN'T do something creative with it. The problem is not even this single tool itself, but the greater amalgamation of all AI tools that arise from the general soceital phenomenon of using AI.
The problem with many technophiles is that they have a very distorted view of what they create. They often think it's going to do good because it's so cool but once that tech is out in the real world, it just mostly causes damage.
If you're interested, feel free to reach out to me because I am starting an anti-AI coalition.
Technology is just what it is. Good and bad are human categories that don't apply to technology per se (and are very subjective categories that change dramatically across time, space, and culture)
What humans use it for is another discussion.
One example:
- You can use nuclear fission to provide light and warmth to millions or blow up millions.
Is nuclear fission good or bad?
I would argue it depends what humans make of it.
Same with what you call "AI".
I wish you luck with your coalition, but once a technology is "out there", you cant take it back. I don't think there is an example in history where that happened, would be curious if you know one.
In a certain light smartphones resemble the moral equivalent of violating the Prime Directive.
"Here, rural areas and undeveloped nations. Take this crippled, distorted window into the greater internet. It happens to be much better at viewing content than creating it and will surveil you more closely than ever you watch it. The preinstalled software is forbidden to remove. Don't view it more than ten minutes a day or the content recommended by social media algorithms may cause malaise. Like and subscribe for more content."
AI here to clone a voice was used to make a mother think her daughter had been kidnapped
(2) People getting fired from their jobs such as illustrators because AI can now do things. Also, people NOT getting hired when they could.
(3) I am a professional writer, and I know of some websites who are using generative AI for articles and hiring less (or even firing writers)
(4) AI removes what remaining reliance we have on each other and makes it less likely for people to talk to each other when needing some basic information. The societal effects of destroying communities where people need each other are pretty clear.
That's actually a problem for the business model of mobile games. A consumer can - or very soon will be able to - pick up AI tools and cut out the middleman org churning out these illustrations, just like they cut out the professionals. It won't be too long before games are made that advertise "put your original characters in the game", and it won't be some complicated character creation tool - it'll be generative stuff.
There's a lot of "but wait, there's more" in what's happening around AI.
> I think AI use in art tools is inevitable, but replacing artists at any level is not a good thing.
Everything in the computing space has been shifting labor from one skillset to another skillset and maximizing the output per hour worked so that fewer workers are needed for the same output (but also more tasks are worth doing, because the costs are lower for any given benefit.) Why is displacing people manually building the visual component of video games any worse than, say, displacing typists, secretaries, people delivering interoffice mail -- all of whom also had salaries, dependents, and livelihoods -- while increasing the value of work in the field automating all those things?
I am a luddite and I agree with most luddite sentiments.
Most of this generative AI is NOT about using AI for boring tasks, and have you ever even tried to draw clouds? Not easy. Everyone draws clouds differently, which you would know if you ever tried to draw anything.
Moreover, AI as a societal phenomenon goes way beyond AI drawing clouds.
> which you would know if you ever tried to draw anything
I know exactly how hard it is to draw anything because I tried a bunch of times, and failed. I for one am happy that I can now express my creative ideas, which I couldn't do before due to missing talent / practice.
You're free to personally be happy that you can express your creative ideas, but it is a bit absurd to expect people who did put in the effort in practicing to not see you in a negative light as someone who wants the 'benefits' without putting in the hard work of self-improvement.
This is a uniquely AI related issue, as artists of all mediums can relate with each other about their struggles learning and improving their skills and ability to express themselves.
That's trying to put words in my mouth. We were talking about creative expression being taken away by AI, and I argued that artists can still retain creative expression, and that these AI tools make it possible for more people to express themselves creatively.
I never said that artists should have no reason to feel unhappy about that. That's criticising a position I didn't argue.
“I for one am happy that I can now express my creative ideas, which I couldn't do before due to missing talent / practice.”
The problem here is we need to look beyond our own self interest to how this will impact other people.
We don’t make a career out of art. This technology is just a novelty to us and but many others rely on it for themselves and their family and had no way of foreseeing the technology coming. They need it more than we do.
> Most of this generative AI is NOT about using AI for boring tasks, and have you ever even tried to draw clouds? Not easy. Everyone draws clouds differently, which you would know if you ever tried to draw anything.
Perlin noise on a plane, can be either in line with the camera or off at an angle. Nice effect. Very easy. I don't even count myself as a proper artist.
Clouds can obviously be hard when you have a specific cloud formation in mind — but "just" a random cloud, to the standards of most who will observe it, is much easier.
And of course, there are plenty of free photographs of clouds, and Photoshop has had plenty of filters — even from the days before people had broadband, let alone what people now call AI — to turn those photographs into different styles.
> Perlin noise on a plane, can be either in line with the camera or off at an angle.
This looks like trash and doesn't look like clouds. Even if you're doing procedural clouds, everyone does them differently. And a lot better than just slapping Perlin noise on a plane. Photoshop filters cannot change the bones of a cloud, and when people are illustrating clouds they're taking entirely different approaches. They're not just "this cloud, but flat" or "this cloud, but with a fuzzy diffused look." All you're doing is showcasing your own lack of knowledge on the subject while filling the arrogant techbro stereotype perfectly.
You're almost there. Few recognize that Art is human communication. Most just want a pretty or awe inspiring image, or an illustration to supply the consumer's lack of imagination.
Perhaps with commercial art, pragmatic bread and butter art being automated and pooped out by noncomprehending, non-communicating consumers the job of real Art that communicates the frontiers of human experience using rich metaphor and on the edge of language and reason can work without having to also deliver hallmark nonsense.
Yeah, the economics to allow this are all fucked. But if you're an artist communicating your human experience, that does not matter, it's a part of your work.
The reduction of "techies" to emotionless robots is an unfair generalization. The inappropriate and wildly inaccurate comparison to slave labor is out of line.
Even taking your arguments at face value, it doesn't really make sense: Let's agree and say that AI can never make "real art." How does AI art existing prevent human-made art with the intent of self expression from existing? You say it will make human art less commercially viable, but that's hardly related to the expression behind the art. Human art has just as much expression whether or not it is a commercial success. Is your argument about financial viability or expression? Would you agree that having deep human expression enhances the value of a piece of art? Are you aware that artists who focus wholly on expression were already stereotypically "starving," even before AI art was a thing?
I use any tool available to create art and express myself, so I does not really matter what you think of it. Art is a very subjective thing anyway and we can argue for hours what "art" really is. But here are some of my thoughts regarding your comment, I think they apply to many others in this thread as well.
>UNLIKE other tools, AI makes creative decisions. No other tool has done this
If you use any other tool or technology (for example certain oil paint, canvases, sculpting material, motif, etc.) that also implies a creative decision.
>its primary purpose is to take away the reliance on artists
That is not true. It might be the purpose that some people ascribe to it, but it is a technology & a tool.
Humans decide what its purpose is, its purpose is not inherent to the technology itself.
You can use Imagen to create very personal and individual self-expression. With open source models that you can tweak and train yourself there are many possibilities to get an individual result.
I guess you only looked at things like Dall-E and came to the conclusion that this would replace artists.
The same thing people said about photography aka "This is just a technology to replace portrait painters/landscape painters etc."
If you learn more about how Imagen works you will understand that there are many possibilities to make it your own and create meaningful self-expression.
>even if "normal human art" exists, it will never gain much traction or commercial viability.
There is 0 indication of that. Why do you think that?
FWIW the current art "market" is what makes me sick, so I am happy for any tech or idea that demolishes it and makes room for something new and creative.
> What techies NEVER understand about art is this: that art is not just the end product for the artist but something they use to express THEMSELVES.
And yet artists have always used tools and adapted themselves to the qualities of those tools. Paints, paintbrushes, canvases, chemicals, instruments of all kinds inform the end result just as much as the artist's initial intention.
Jackson Pollock's most famous works were produced by splattering paints on a canvas. Sure, he selected the paints, the canvas, and the trajectory and velocity of the splatters, but his works are as much the expression of stochastic fluid dynamics as they are of his vision.
Nothing is stopping people who see handcrafting every intricate detail of their work as an expression of their innermost sense of self from continuing to do so just as they always have.
If that's what they're getting out it, why should it bother them that people who do just want to obtain the end product for their own purposes are getting it from someplace else?
> AI is a tool that is and always will make the creation of art less a matter of the expression of the human soul
I firmly disagree. I have a very strong imagination, but I never had time (and still don't have the time between full-time work and needing to learn German) to develop the skills to turn what I can imagine into artefacts that others can enjoy by my own hand. AI gives me the means to turn some of what I imagine into things I can share — not everything! (SD is so terrible at dragons, even the basic body plan is all over the place) — but it can help with many things.
> its primary purpose is to take away the reliance on artists. The ultimate aim of BIG TECH is to take away this reliance so that they can be the ultimate source of cheap art, just like cheap slave labour is the ultimate source of cheap and unsustainable clothing for most people.
IMO the purpose is fully automated luxury communism.
Stable Diffusion is free, so "Big Tech" (which would here have to include a small German academic spin-off) can't reap huge rewards from this, just like there's no huge business case for yet more video call services or social networks — too much competition for the money.
Finally, just yesterday I was watching a year-old video from a german robot supplier that's undercutting "cheap slave labour" for clothing.
It's actually "fully automated luxury gay space communism", all words are important there. Also, in the Culture series, arguably the seminal series about the "fully automated etc.", there's a whole scene about AI producing art (i.e. nobody cares or think it's interesting)
> there's a whole scene about AI producing art (i.e. nobody cares or think it's interesting)
As I recall, this was a conversation between an organic person and a Mind, a specific category of AI that's quite capable of running several billion uploaded human consciousnesses simultaneously in real time, and it was the Mind who was saying that yes, they could make far better music, but they didn't want to.
So I suppose your need to create AI diversions is more important than the need of others to feel a sense of purpose through their work through their actual talent that you don't have? Good thing you have a full-time job....
Big Tech will benefit immensely from AI. Even if Stable Diffusion is free, it will spurn the development of new computers and new technology to run models like Stable Diffusion, so even not immediate things benefit big tech.
Fully automated luxury communism is a rather bleak future, and it will take us away from being stewards of the environment, and instead consume as many resources as possible.
Finally, even if you are doing something relatively harmless with Stable Diffisuion, many other people will use AI for malicious purposes.
> So I suppose your need to create AI diversions is more important than the need of others to feel a sense of purpose through their work through their actual talent that you don't have?
Not so. Sense of purpose is important.
Your sense of purpose conflicts with the opportunity of everyone else to express themselves as they wish.
For now. The LLMs will come/are coming for mine, just as diffusion models and GANs eat at the jobs of graphical artists.
> Fully automated luxury communism is a rather bleak future, and it will take us away from being stewards of the environment, and instead consume as many resources as possible.
It's (currently) pure Utopianism, taking on whatever hopes the proponents want it to have no matter how unrealistic. I therefore think you're arguing on the basis of which team it's associated with, without understanding the details of what it is you hate.
> Finally, even if you are doing something relatively harmless with Stable Diffisuion, many other people will use AI for malicious purposes.
Oh absolutely. Whole can of worms there.
Can say the same about basically every tech way back to the wheel, fire, and pointy stick, though unlike most using this analogy I am well aware of the problem of induction (in particular the turkey and the farmer), and don't claim that it will all work out just because it has so far.
AI in general could make us immortal, with lives of leisure and free from all suffering… or it could turn us all into paperclips to maximise shareholder value.
> Your sense of purpose conflicts with the opportunity of everyone else to express themselves as they wish.
I do not believe people should be able to express themselves as they wish unconditionally. They should not be able to express themselves to the point of destroying the environment, they should not be able to express themselves by creating nuclear weapons or something EXTREMELY dangerous (AI), they should not be able to express themselves by disrupting society.
AI is just as disrupting as creating biological or chemical weapons, and perhaps even worse.
And it would horrible if AI could make us immortal. We should die...
> I do not believe people should be able to express themselves as they wish unconditionally. They should not be able to express themselves to the point of destroying the environment, they should not be able to express themselves by creating nuclear weapons or something EXTREMELY dangerous (AI), they should not be able to express themselves by disrupting society.
That's just an anthropomorphization of “produces deterministic results of its inputs that are practically intractable to compute by other means”. But Stable Diffusion doesn’t “make creative decisions” any more than POV-Ray or (pre-Generative fill) Photoshop.
I agree, but I'll be more precise: AI may not make creative decisions, but it generates something that approximates a creative decision to a sufficient level that people are willing to use it as a replacement for real creative decision.
There. My argument works without modification but with this more precise definition.
(However, I think the negative feelings don't come from a discussion of "real vs fake" or "classical vs new", but mostly from the point of view that using artwork as training data is stealing. I don't agree with that view, but I think it's at the core of the argument.)